


Family Honor

by sunryder



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pokemon Fusion, Gen, I think that might only be a tag because of me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-13 02:13:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10504302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunryder/pseuds/sunryder
Summary: It is a universal truth that the old families had secrets. No-Maj or Wizard, families don’t get or hold on to their power for generations without something special lurking in their back pocket. For some it was beauty, others money, for some brute power, and for others still it was their compromised morality. For the Graves family, it was their honor. When a Graves stood before you, their word was their bond, and so it had been from the days back when the world was wild.On the farthest wall of the room, past the cistern and the family tree and cross-stitching was the greatest heirloom of the Graves family: a Honedge.





	

**Author's Note:**

> You know how some people sort their favorites into Hogwarts houses? For me, I waste time figuring out which Pokemon they would have. I went down that rabbit hole last night and this is what came out. 
> 
> Also, the first time a pokemon is mentioned the name should be a link to an official picture.

Grindelwald’s plan had been horrifying in its simplicity. He spent months stirring up the criminal elements of New York, running the Aurors so ragged that by the time they had a lull Seraphina demanded that Graves take the weekend off. A whole 60 hours where the Auror department had express orders from the President herself not to contact Graves unless the world was ending. 60 hours where Grindelwald could exploit the hole that he’d spent months carving into the wards around Percival’s ancestral home. Judging by the magical residue, he’d spelled the whole house into stasis, everyone and everything from portraits to house elves, using the original Sleeping Beauty spell that had been lost to time until Grindelwald’s curiosity had dug it up again.

As near as Graves could tell, it had taken Grindelwald an entire day to find the entrance and break into the ward room that was the magical heart of the Graves family brownstone. When Percival woke nearly two days later he was bare ass naked and spread eagled at the center of the ward room’s runic circle. However, he still had ink on his fingers from the last of his paperwork and the faint smell of mustard on his breath. That meant that while Grindelwald had made it past the nudity requirement of the preparations, the dark bastard hadn’t had a chance to cast a _scourgio_ , let alone wash Percival in the enchanted cistern that was necessary before the kind of serious ritual magic that happened in the ward room. (And yes, Percival had _decided_ that Grindelwald had used his magic to strip him rather than doing it by hand. It was less horrendous than the other option.) 

Given the state of his body when he woke, Percival assumed that Grindelwald had arranged Percival then gone to the storage room on the far side of the chamber to find the cistern in question. There were two cupboards in the corners closest to the storage room’s door, one filled with spell ingredients and the other with cleaning supplies – both necessary for… whatever you might get up to in the circle.

(Cursing procedure, Percival had bent the rules just enough to grab one of the towels in the second cupboard. He couldn’t bring himself to put back on the clothes that Grindelwald had dumped in a pile in case there might be evidence left behind, but it was a bit humiliating to greet his Aurors in nothing but a towel.)

The rest of the walls were taken up by a family tree carved into the very foundation – if you wanted to cast someone out of the bloodline you had to do it down here – the incantation you had to speak when you washed yourself in the basin – cross-stitched and hung by a great-grandmother with exquisite common sense – and various family artifacts that were meant to make you feel sufficiently burdened by your legacy and question whether or not the magic you were about to engage in was something that would make all these generations proud. At least, that was the explanation Percival’s grandfather had given him when he asked, but the man had always enjoyed giving unverifiable answers to quell Percival’s questions.

After a thorough scan from Percival himself, his two lieutenants, an ICW representative, Dumbledore, and the Graves house elves, Percival was certain that Grindelwald hadn’t touched his hands or his magic to anything to anything in the room. Anything other than the heirloom mounted on the back wall.

You see, had Grindelwald not found himself distracted by the wall, his actions would have gone something like this. At some point before he had mounted his offense on MACUSA, Grindelwald had found himself a [Cofagrigus](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:563Cofagrigus.png). Whether he had found the sarcophagus pokemon by chance or through scouring the ancient cemeteries of the world, they would never know. Legends said that the Cofagrigi sat in wait for grave robbers, using their four ghostly arms to drag the unwary into their hollow bellies where they would devour the life and magic of their prey.

Popular consensus was that when the creature was done, the desiccated corpse it spat out would become a mummy. The department’s original theory was that Grindelwald had been trying to turn Percival into one of the undead. Though when one of the Junior Aurors shared the common perception with Newt – simultaneously trying to shock the magizoologist and feign knowledge he didn’t have so the scientist might finally notice his flirting – Newt seemed appalled at the stupidity. “Where would the Cofagrigus get the fabric to wrap around the body? And how would it reanimate the corpse?”

While a Cofagrigus did occasionally consume humans – “You can’t really blame them when they’ve been trapped in these locations by humans and forced to _starve_ to protect the dead.” Newt objected. – such a means of murder seemed dramatic, even by Grindelwald’s standards. After Newt had shot down the prevailing theory that Grindelwald had been trying to turn Graves into a mummy –accidentally stoking the Junior Auror’s crush and giving rise to at least four more at the same time – he explained in halting words that if you applied the right amount of torture and rage before you fed a still-breathing person to a Cofagrigus, that was the most certain way to create a [Yamask](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:562Yamask.png).

The whole department had frozen in mute horror while Newt stumbled out, “No one knows for certain, of course, so I might be wrong.” He wasn’t, of course. Apparently it was actually a bit of an honor for the Pharoahs to feed their most devoted soldiers to the Cofagrigus. Those warriors sacrificed a good burial and the pleasures of the afterlife in exchange for the privilege to have some part of them live forever, carrying on their memories and their strengths in the generations to come.

Aurors were a bit more familiar with ghost pokemon than most. Though they didn’t know the history like Newt did, they knew a Yamask was a small black cloud with two tendril-like arms that you wanted to avoid touching you just the same as you would any other ghost pokemon. The creature had two enormous red eyes that wavered as though they were tearing up and about to spill over. That alone wouldn’t get you a passing grade on the department quiz, because the identifying, haunting characteristic of a Yamask was the face that hovered at the core of its amorphous mass.

“It’s own death mask.” Newt explained. “Each one has a different face, precisely as it looked in life. The Egyptian myths claim that the younger generation would catch a Yamask and steal from them the mask that they carried and wear it. If the soldier was too weak then the mask would take them over, but if the soldier was strong enough, they would have access to all the memories and skills that the human had carried in life.” 

“So Grindelwald was going to torture me until my spirit was too unsettled to rest, then feed me to the sarcophagus pokemon, turn me into a pokemon, and then capture my soul so he would have access to everything that makes me, me. 

Newt flinched. “In theory.”

In fact.

Rather than dragging him to the safety of one of his own locations, Grindelwald had dragged Percival to the seat of the Graves family magic. That meant he wasn’t just planning on capturing Percival’s soul, he was going to practice the kind of dark magic that would give him Percival’s place in the family magic so that no one, living or dead, would be able to tell them apart. As Percival Graves, last of his bloodline, and MACUSA Director of Magical Security, there was no telling what kind of havoc Grindelwald could have wreaked. There were ancient alliances from before the Graves family had crossed the ocean, passwords and protocols tucked away behind impenetrable walls in his mind, artifacts tucked away in the family vault, and all the might of Percival’s own name. It would’ve been a bloodbath.

And yet, as close as he had come to meeting it, to Percival it seemed a distant and terrible death. Because Grindelwald hadn’t managed to torture him or capture his soul. The darkest wizard of their time hadn’t even managed to get Percival scrubbed down to begin the process.

Instead, the bastard had stepped into the room and gotten distracted by powerful pokemon hanging from the chamber’s back wall.

It is a universal truth that the old families had secrets. No-Maj or Wizard, families don’t get or hold on to their power for generations without something special lurking in their back pocket. For some it was beauty, others money, for some brute power, and for others still it was their compromised morality. For the Graves family, it was their honor. When a Graves stood before you, their word was their bond, and so it had been from the days back when the world was wild.

On the farthest wall of the room, past the cistern and the family tree and cross-stitching was the greatest heirloom of the Graves family: a [Honedge](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:XY_Prerelease_Honedge_unsheathed.png).

It was a short sword, meant for one hand while a wizard had his wand in the other – at least, that was how the family history said the first Graves had done it. The sheath was simple and brown, the blade was silver, while the hand and pommel had been carved from a single piece of dragon bone. At the center of the pommel sat a grey moonstone, brought all the way from Rome by the man that same first Graves had murdered to have it.

The sword might have simply been a family heirloom were it not for the blue-grey cloth wrapped around the handle and left to drape long, the whole length of the sword. That was the only identifying feature that what once upon a time had been a sword, was now a particularly brutal pokemon.

You see, as a wand was often buried with its wizard, his sword would be thrust into the ground at the head of his grave. Ancient custom said that if the sword was still there in the morning then the warrior had been granted the right to sleep in peace. But if the sword had vanished in the night, then the warrior’s soul had been consumed by the sword and would stay trapped until he earned his rest. (That first Graves had betrayed his honor, had killed an innocent man in the name of a pretty rock, and with his execution had not only condemned himself to centuries of punishment, but had forged their family’s identity.)

Percival couldn’t begin to speculate what Gellert Grindewald might have known about the Honedge before him. He might have been woefully uninformed and in a simple twist of luck might have chosen to take the sword because he could, though that seemed impossible. What was far more likely was that Grindelwald knew precisely what he saw, and as he assumed that he would be able to overwhelm every trace of Percival in the death mask, he likewise assumed that he would be able to take the Honedge with no consequences.

If it was used, a Honedge could evolve into a [Doublade](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:680Doublade.png), a pair of swords so fierce in dueling that no human could be their equal. With enough bloodshed and enough will, the Doublade could evolve yet a step further into an [Aegislash](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/File:681Aegislash.png), a sword and shield that was said to choose only kings. Its loyalty to that king would be so great that it could manipulate the people and pokemon around it to share in that loyalty. Greek and Roman mythology were ripe with Doublades and Aegislashes, while King Arthur and his famous Excaliber had only been a Honedge. Nothing could be so wonderful for his revolution against the No-Mages as the sword of a king, and so all logic suggested that Grindelwald had reached for the sword, taking it as his own.

But you see, as powerful as Grindelwald was, as special as he was, and as much as the Honedge might have followed him if he had been anyplace else in the world, he had come into the seat of the Graves family magic. So whatever else the Honedge that had once been the first Graves might have done, in this place, he remembered the dishonor that had trapped him in a sword, and he remembered the generations of honor that his family had carried out to cleanse that stain.

Under normal circumstances, anyone unworthy who took a Honedge by the hilt would find the cloth wrapped around their arm like the world’s most aggressive Devil’s Snare, and it would drain away the life of anyone who dared try. And so, in a twist that must have shocked Gellert Grindelwald to his core, the Graves family Honedge slithered its trap around Grindelwald’s arm and bound him so tight that no cutting, no burning, no blasting, no writhing, and no screaming could set him free before the Graves family honor had claimed his life. 

Percival Graves woke to one house elf zapping him with every trace of her magic to force him out of the stasis, while the other elf stared into the storage room at the world’s most terrifying dark wizard crumpled between the twin swords of the newly evolved Doublade lying beside him on the ground.


End file.
